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From the Other Side of the Fence…
So, yesterday I included letters a bit more pro-open source, today, from the other side. (Hey, who says I can’t be balanced…) This is meant to be a discussion of course, and some are more passionate than others. The thing I really do like though is learning *why* people believe and work the way they do. I can always learn something.
Chris wrote in to say: "I don’t mean to be critical, but what planet are our polite-but-misinformed open source advocates living on?
* Inferior support for closed products? I can pay a couple hundred bucks and have Microsoft dedicate support engineers to my problem, and they will escalate the case whenever I believe it is necessary.
* Plenty of people familiar with the source code? Not according to any studies I’ve seen. There are lots of people "interested" in open source, but they are spread over a huge number of products. Most open source projects have fewer people working on them than any development team I’ve ever been a part of. It is accurate to think of open source as a company with hundreds of thousands of products, each of which has, on average, 2-3 developers working on it. While more popular products (like MySQL and PostgreSQL, mentioned in today’s letters) have more people involved, it’s still not many, folks, and most are very part-time. The fact is that when people need fixes, they generally do the same thing a Microsoft customer would do, and in fact the same thing today’s writer did with PostgreSQL:
Contact the organization (open-source authorship is still an organization, after all) and hope they’ll fix it. And just like their closed counterparts, sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t. Open-source advocates just like to quote the success stories. I’ve had plenty of those, but I’ve had plenty of disasters, too. The difference is that with open source, if a product won’t get fixed, then we ditch it and pick another one.
Can you imagine doing that with your database server product?
* The whole "free" thing is open source’s moral high ground. It’s great to have access to source code, even if (as noted above and proven repeatedly by
research) few people read it and even fewer work on it. However, when a product says it is "free" everyone and their uncle will understand this to be a claim that it is "free of financial cost," and open-source marketeers know this just as well as their closed-source counterparts.
* MySQL better than Sybase was? I’ve been doing nothing but database work for 20 years, and I hate to burst anybody’s bubble, but Sybase was good. MySQL has more features now than Sybase did then, sure, but as a core database engine, I’m not so sure. And the fact is that the core features are what people use most.
The very fact that the comparison would be made between Sybase 4.21a (the cutover version for Sybase and Microsoft) and the current version of MySQL is telling. MySQL spent years trying to get people to believe that transactions were not an important database feature, when anybody worth their salt recognized that without transactions, you don’t even have a proper database to begin with. The reason for all the pseudo-academic nonsense, of course, was that MySQL didn’t support them. The product still has issued with SMP effectiveness, memory issues, and so forth.
Sorry to rant, but at the end of the day, it’s all just software. Today’s letters were written from the perspective of people who work in closed source environments but are open source advocates. I am in the same position, but we have to understand that these arguments that people make for open source just don’t make much sense in the business world. MySQL is going to have to compete on price and features, pure and simple, and so far it has had trouble in that arena, especially with enterprise scale features.
They will undoubtedly consolidate their *nix market share and cannibalize other *nix database products to some extent, but Sun will have to come up with some extraordinary ideas, paradigm-shifting even, for them to reach out successfully beyond that."
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